Data overload; When useless College Station emails takes over your Tamu inbox

By Emely Cruz, '22

|Photo: Virginia Limon

College Station emails for events and organizations for main campus.

The faculty and staff on campus constantly hold students accountable for not checking their school emails. They fail to realize that the majority of students school email addresses are basically an abyss. Everything that gets sent to our school emails is very likely to remain unseen. This is due to the large amount of random emails sent from college station. More than 3/4 ‘s of the emails I receive do not apply to me. There are so many that I lose the stamina to fish through to see if anything is important.

For example, the clutter in my email caused me to miss a note about an assignment I submitted on ecampus. My lab assistant was trying to inform me that my file was corrupted and I needed to re submit the assignment. In the midst of all the weeks emails, I wasn’t able to respond or even read the important email from my instructor which caused me to lose credit on my assignment. Unfortunately, this is not the only instance of this happening. I also missed an email from my advisor over scheduling a meeting which resulted in me having to take the last available time slot. This became a problem since I had previously made plans to work on a project at that time.

However, the problem is not only about the quantity of emails sent, it is also about the content. At the start of the semester many students struggled to differentiate between the emails directed towards College Station and Galveston students. This resulted in multiple problems, that could have been easily avoided. For starters, some students attended the wrong New Student Conference (NSC) and others accidentally purchased parking passes designated for College Station students. In order to prevent problems like this the TAMU offices should make clear in order to keep students from making such large mistakes.